Exclusive: General Galactic emerges from stealth to make methane from carbon dioxide
Summary
There, he met Luke Neise, and the two started the company after realizing that producing methane from carbon dioxide would be more useful here on Earth than it would be on Mars.The two struck out on their own after graduating from Stanford in 2022, and they raised a $1.9 million pre-seed round in July 2023 from venture capital firms including Box Group and Refactor.The north star for us is to make methane in a way that is literally cheaper to synthesize from the air, to reuse the emissions, than to pump it out of the ground, Mattison told TechCrunch.The plan is to design and develop the entire system in house so the startup can capture carbon dioxide from the air, produce hydrogen from water and combine the two to form methane, all using renewable power. Its a sharp difference from other companies, which work on just one piece of the puzzle, whether it be direct air capture, electrolysis or e-fuels production.By integrating the entire stack and selling just the fuel, not the equipment, Mattison said General Galactic will have a greater incentive to drive down costs. Whereas we want to sell the fuel, so our goal is to minimize those costs.General Galactics plan is to modularize each key component, an approach thats becoming standard these days among climate tech startups. We want to be anywhere that people are using methane today, Mattison said.Its a lofty goal, though that shouldnt be surprising given General Galactics similarly ambitious plan to do everything in-house. Each of those components direct air capture units, electrolyzers and methane reactors could form the basis of independent businesses.